Now don’t get me serious on this. I am an engineer by training and only worked in R&D so marketing is something I only read about and never actually practised. So, again this is just a musing on my beloved new social web tool or micro-blogging or whatever-makes-the-poets-happy you wanna call it. Please you people on Twitter inc. don’t fail! Make sure that in these difficult times you end up with a viable revenue stream to keep the service alive. Now to my naif suggestions that could also be read as genuine questions to satisfy my curiosity.

1. Set up a “pro” or if you don’t like the connotations a “plus” type of account were you get a tick next to your name (say @mgpolitis +plus) and charge a pettiness for it, say 5 USD per year via paypal or similar. For some icing in the cake through non-cost options in the deal like extra templates only for “+plus” users, more space for the short bio field in the user profile or any silly perk you can come up to that in reality costs zilch.

2. Set up a more professional offering with one-click backup and restore account options, added features like transparent user switch off (a.k.a. “muting”: removing the updates of selected followers without un-following them), click and pick thematic group creation and charge even more for this.

Now this is just what I came up with in some milliscoble worth of my time. I am pretty sure you have brilliant people working for you. Can you please explain to me why on earth you are not doing even the most obvious to raise some money? Please, I am really interested because it is impossible for me (I said I’m an R&D Chemical Engineer) to understand why you are not doing it.